Maybe I did not make myself clear enough.

What I wanted to clarify is, whether the string you pass to system would work on its own when typed into a terminal.

So, again my question, maybe more explicit:

After opening a plain terminal, with your normal shell running, does pasting the following command work?

sdb -d root on 'sdb -d shell; ls';
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If that doesn't work without Perl, it won't work with Perl added either.

If you want to run multiple commands within one shell session, I recommend creating a shell script and launching that script via system.

Okay. Thanks for your elaborate explanation. But

system("sdb -d root on 'sdb -d shell; ls'");
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the syntax used here is what I found to run multiple commands of shell by one system call. But only in this specific case it does not work.

 system("sdb -d root on 'sdb -d shell; cd /opt; ls';bash ");
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gives error of "root does not take more than one arguement" while the following system call runs fine.

system("sdb -d shell 'cd /opt; ls';bash ");
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executing all the 3 shell commands sequentially in one child terminal. and running independently

system("sdb -d root on");
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also works fine.

So, your problem is with the sdb program. It says that "sdb root" does not take more than one argument. But you are giving it two arguments, on and 'sdb -d shell; cd /opt; ls'. I'm pretty confident that your command line as you show it to us does not work outside of Perl either.

This is not a Perl problem but a problem with the sdb program. I suggest you consult the documentation of the sdb program and/or ask the vendor of the program on how to proceed.